


Pomegranate

by gnimmish



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2016-11-04
Packaged: 2018-08-29 01:47:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8470873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnimmish/pseuds/gnimmish
Summary: Alex and Maggie on a stakeout, sharing snacks and stories.





	

About an hour into their first stakeout, Maggie produces a pomegranate and a penknife.

They’re on the roof of an apartment block, watching an empty place across the street where it seems likely that a particularly unpleasant trade in alien body parts is being hosted, but it’s midday and they’re gonna be sat here for hours before any really credible evidence shows up. It’s late fall, and the day is cloudless but starting to be chilly – the light has that glassy quality peculiar to this time of year – they’re sharing a thermos of coffee. And there are worse people to be stuck on a roof with for a day.

Maggie slices her pomegranate into halves and then quarters, exposing deep crimson seeds and dribbling sticky red juice on the concrete at their feet.

“You want some?”

“Sure.” Alex can’t remember the last time she tasted pomegranate seeds. She has a vague memory of being impressed by how pretty they looked, as a very young child, and then disappointed by how bitter they were – she had wanted them to taste like strawberries.

There’s no clean way to get the seeds out of the skin, of course, and Maggie’s fingers are sticky as she lounges against the low wall around the roof, setting the quarters out on top of it, breaking them open to expose cranial clusters of shiny blood-red under filmy white skin. She offers Alex a tightly packed nest of seeds.

Alex breaks them apart and almost immediately scatters half of them everywhere. Maggie giggles at her consternation.

“Yeah, they do that.”

Alex is not going to be beaten by a fruit. She picks the rest apart with care. “Why would you bring pomegranate up here? I can think of at least ten snacks easier to eat.”

Maggie shrugs – she still looks too amused by Alex. “I think we appreciate the things we have to work for.”

Alex shakes her head at her, but succeeds in getting the rest of the seeds into her mouth without any further loss of dignity. They taste clean, sharp.

“It’s good, right?” Maggie is sucking juice off her fingers. “I never had one before I moved to California – I was eighteen – they can grow them there. They don’t grow much in Nebraska.”

“I have wipes,” Alex goes fishing in her bag, proffers one to Maggie, who has resorted to wiping her hands on her coat.

Maggie’s dimples show up at exactly the moment Alex thinks they will, which doesn’t make them less distracting. “Of course you do. Of course you’re that woman with wet wipes in her bag. Do you have socks in there too?”

She’s teasing her, but Alex not only has socks, she has fresh underwear, tampons, tweezers, painkillers, hotsauce, a travel sewing kit, and protein bars. Between those things and her gun and badge she’s generally down to solve pretty much any problem the universe can throw her way at any given moment.

“Hotsauce?” Maggie is weirdly tickled by this particular revelation, “you carry hotsauce in your purse?”

“It’s my sister’s thing,” Alex waves a hand, “when she was a kid she’d drink it straight out the bottle. If I’d let her she’d have it on ice cream.”

“So you keep it with you for what – condiment emergencies?”

“You’d be surprised by how often those occur.”

“Well look at you, living your best Beyonce lifestyle.”

Alex snorts, goes back to dissecting pomegranate. She’s enjoying the taste better than she did as a child. “Why did you move to California?”

“Spoken like someone who was not brought up in Blue Springs, Nebraska.”

Maggie delicately dissects another cluster of seeds and then places the handful into Alex’s palm. Alex breathes around the touch of her fingers, the delicate way Maggie focuses on the movement so she’s not dropping them, the knit of her brow – then she goes back to sucking juice off her hand like a kid, all unguarded. Alex resists the urge to make her use the damn wipe. God she’s too used to mothering Kara.

“One of the first things I bought, when I got off the bus,” Maggie’s expression has gone distant. “Didn’t even know what they were, just knew there weren’t any back home. I sat on the pavement and I ate pomegranates like some crazy person, got the juice up to my elbows, didn’t care.”

Alex can imagine it – a younger Maggie, more bone, less muscle, waifish, dusty with travel, sitting on some California curb side with a duffle bag and a pomegranate, making a mess, smug with her own freedom.

“What?” The woman in question tosses her head, casting Alex an amused glance.

Alex shrugs, because _what_ is increasingly a question she can’t answer around Maggie. “I bet you had fun.”

“I had an adventure. I’m still having it.” She offers Alex another cluster of seeds. “You should have one too some time.”

Alex could point out that she literally works with aliens and superheroes and that seems like plenty of adventure for one life time – but she has the distinct impression that that’s not the kind of adventure Maggie means, and god she can feel herself blushing, _why is she blushing_?

She concentrates on the pomegranate seeds instead.


End file.
